


Fledgling

by Firelight_and_Rain



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Cleaning Out my Old Drafts, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 04:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15655455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firelight_and_Rain/pseuds/Firelight_and_Rain
Summary: Distance makes the heart grow fonder.





	Fledgling

Aunna placed every letter she got from Leliana in a box that used to hold flour. It used to hold flour, then it held poisons, then it held soaps and knives, cosmetics and loose change. She’d stare down at the little box and wonder at how well it all fit together, the broken cogs of her life, like just enough change to make a dollar. How it served her and Alistair to only go to fancy dinners in the palace together (otherwise he was too tall and too fast. She got lost, even if a grey warden never was supposed to lose her way anymore). Anyway. The letters got shorter, even if they got more frequent - she didn’t mind so much, as long as they kept coming. Zevran - Zevran who had Opportunities that he had to get to, she understood that from the start, (even if it didn’t matter really she used the old Duster mantra of counting the good bruises against the bad and the brands) - helped her to puzzle over the words she forgot and jokingly accepted when she pummelled his arms with her small, calloused fists for reading ahead.

*

The Chantry had always kept aeries and had always used messenger pigeons, and Leliana loved that the voices of the nations soared above the land from dawn until dusk. Even then, she always thought, there was someone up in those towers ensuring that the small feathered things reached their destinations. Yet, now (dusk - the sky was an uninspired blue but soon it would be the color of a nightingale’s down), as she climbed the stairs of a tower outside Val Royeaux, the wind felt icy on her skin. Clear. Cutting. And, oh, she loved the wild parts of Fereldan after her Warden had shown her how peaceful and unowned they were (well, when they were not infested by monstrous spiders, of course) but this wind brought memories of Haven and she shivered. The Divine had offered her a good place, where she could not only be safe from Marjorlaine, her ilk and her influence, but work towards her Maker’s will no matter the jagged or funereal shape of the world after the events of the Blight, yet she hated that it was a waiting place - because Aunna was still in Fereldan, and still their hero. She also had her very definite concept of what that meant. She would not be one for Orlesian intrigue. Leliana took her letter and found a pigeon, too introspective to coo at it. As she held it in her hands she thought of herself, of her own fear, her own tethers and her own beating wings, and she thought about Aunna Brosca. She hoped that the aerie the Wardens used would be kind to this little bird. This time, she did not think of the journey after, or where it would find her next, or if it would get lost. Aunna sometimes thought of things like that despite herself. She didn’t think, also, if the night or the day would be kind to the bird, because that was supposedly its element.


End file.
